


Will of Eternity

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:34:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21724570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: A black wolf against white snow. The treachery of Chaos. The path, in crimson. An unassailable will.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	Will of Eternity

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Воля вечности](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22439008) by [Alre_Snow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alre_Snow/pseuds/Alre_Snow), [WTF_Warhammer_Legions_2020](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WTF_Warhammer_Legions_2020/pseuds/WTF_Warhammer_Legions_2020)



An unfamiliar moon hangs above, bloated and full. The stars whisper like an impatient audience.

The air is so crisp it snaps. The snow is deep and will only deepen; it is hard enough to push through already, broad-chested and long-legged as he is. An infinity of unique flakes tumbles from shaggy black fur, shaken off to melt into the unidentifiable slush. A scarred muzzle swings left and right, catching the shadow of tree-limbs that shudder like hanged men in the slowly-rising wind. Just beyond the oaks stalk nameless, half-formed things, drawn to the spark of a vagrant soul.

Wood and snow. The forest is old. It is an isle, an iris - it was here before the wolf was born, before the shattering, before the fall, before the engines, before the eclipse. When he is gone, dead, buried, devoured, when his being is scattered to the hungry stars, the forest will be here.

A man could wage a war from this foothold. He could make it a fortress-place, a command centre, a planetary hub, a dock-spur, a conquest-leg. A man could become a king.

But a wolf is not a man. A wolf has no use for crowns and thrones.

He pushes on through the banks. They tower to block his way, they try to divert him to easier paths. Branches snatch at his hide with gnarled fingers, tearing away hunks of fur and flesh. Soon enough, the wolf is leaving a crimson path in his wake. The creatures that stalk his trail will walk in his bloody footsteps and find their hunt eased by the obstacles he has surmounted. He guides the passage of a dagger to his own heart.

To what purpose? To what end? He must be aware of them. Does he run, then? Does he do this to prolong what little tatters of the soul remain?

No. That has never been his way. In the time before the sacrifice, the wolf was made to be stronger than his creators. His purpose was to slay the invincible, to endure the impossible, to drop the corpse of the galaxy at his master’s feet. And look: he has killed godlings and kings, he has survived ruination and apocalypse, he has tasted the throat-blood of the universe. He was made to be so many things and in all of them, he is a triumph. A triumph.

He shoulders the drifts that try to bury him. Again and again, he rises from those pale graves, chest heaving, panting for air that cuts his throat with cold and sharp ice. Each time he raises his muzzle to the moon and howls defiance.

Each time the answer is a little closer.

When he reaches the clearing, he drops his belly to the snow, panting.

Were they waiting for him, or did he track them down? They would prefer the former. They would never admit the latter. The question is irrelevant: this is their realm, and if they truly wished it, the wolf would never have found anchor here - he would have been stretched across light-years, his demise an endless agony as the denizens of this realm gorged themselves. He would have been unmade, or remade into something torturous and false, or worse not changed at all and left forever wondering what trigger had been left in his flesh.

The trees press close, their boughs hushed, straining to listen to the speech-that-is-not-speech.

There are four other wolves across from the black.

One, the left hand, is a monster of patched fur and open wounds. Bone shows in ghoulish contrast to the purity of snow. At its right flank stands a remarkable opposite - an animal whose pelt is unnaturally smooth and clean, shining with the light of false-stars. There is much that is false about the creature, and though it affects a haughty mien, it keeps one dazzling eye on the furless, skinless beast that growls at it from a distance of several feet.

The last of the four keeps to the shadows, blurring behind trunks. It has two heads. One is always laughing.

They are not a pack. Each would turn on the other in a moment if they could - and, in time past, and in time to come, they will. They will snap and snarl and bite and kill for the slightest advantage. But there is something they all desire. There is one thing, and one thing alone, that would see this chaos undivided. This reveals them: the quiddity of gods and tyrants. Their essential essence. Their authority. Their hunger. Look no further than the feast and the table they would set.

They step back a pace, then another, to allow the black wolf a path of their choosing, between them.

But that is their error. It has always been. The son is not the father. The wolf is not a man.

With a bound, the black wolf moves quicker than sight, quicker than reason, quicker than intent can manifest and be deciphered. His jaws open, yellowed fangs searching for the neck of the closest false-creature - and he has one, and it screams in fear between his teeth, and those powerful muscles lock-

_Dare you to turn from me, O you divine - I have a barb for each of your backs._

-on nothing.

He staggers on two legs instead of four and feels briefly hollow before the solid weight of artificial gravity and tang of recycled air grounds him again. There is no more snow, no more trees, no more freedom - the clatter of cogitators and strategium staff surrounds him as the bubble of Warp translation pops. He is the only one who returned before the Corpse-Emperor’s slaves finished their stratagem. The rest of the warriors taken to Cadia have been unspun, scattered like dreams across the blotched atmosphere of the fortress-world and the tides of the Warp.

One hand goes to the wound delivered by the handmaiden and her flaming sword. Below, it had burned with cleansing fire, had scoured away the dark energies that knit and sealed his flesh. It had hurt like nothing in millennia had hurt. It had conjured up a memory, long-buried, where one wolf had struck another - and that bite had festered, had been the downfall of all that was once promised.

Other senses, too, have returned, the echo of angry waves up a sandy shore. But there is a taste of victory to them. This slaughter, the dying emotions, have fed them well. If he focuses, he can cut away a slice of their titan-thoughts.

He can see it. The fortress-worlds turned upon their creators. The millions that will come to break upon them, the rapacious slaughter, the Eye glutted and never sated. A grist of men and misery, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

This Crusade has pleased them. They lick their lips and think of those to come, as the Imperium floods the Cadian worlds with fresh meat, as the death-count climbs. A new trough.

This deadlock will serve the Dark Gods well.

But a truce means nothing to a wolf.

He gives the orders. He feels the notice of powers beyond comprehension, and he wonders - oh, how he wonders - if this is the hook set in his jaw, if this is the fatal lure, if this was all part of some grander design, if the choice was ever his own. He was made by rutting humans on a broken world. He was made again by scientists and gene-wrights. And perhaps he had already, before and after, been made as the mortal instrument of forces from the Warp, a puppet whose strings were always set, marching to his assigned end like soldiers or angels.

But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what black promises they whisper, which screams for him to stop, which urges him on - it doesn’t matter. It never mattered.

Out in the void, plasma engines lit in the catafalque of debris that surrounded the _Will of Eternity_ , that ancient weapon smashed in orbit before it could bring its true complement of weapons to bear. That baleful eight-speared eye fixes the blue-grey orb of Cadia as a concentrated network of heavy lifters and frigates urge the great hulk from the inertia of orbit into a collision with the fortress-world below.

A draught of brulkwine was decanted, poured into a chalice fashioned from the grand, sightless skull of Horus Lupercal - the bones wrung from the dying flesh of Fabius Bile’s failed clone of the Primarch.

As the Blackstone Fortress fell to break the Cadian Gate, as he looked down on one of the great lengths of chain that bound him for the last time, Abaddon the Despoiler toasted the death of one ancient foe with the remains of another.

His laughter was loud.

The gods were silent.


End file.
